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Open Source Summit 2011

On March 29 & 30, NASA will host its first Open Source Summit at Ames Research Center in Mountain View California. This event will bring together engineers and policy makers across NASA and respected members of the open source community to discuss the challenges with the existing open source policy framework, and propose modifications that would make it easier for NASA to develop, release, and use open source software.

Open source brings numerous benefits to NASA software projects, including increased software quality, reduced development costs, faster development cycles, and reduced barriers to public-private collaboration through new opportunities to commercialize NASA technology. This inherently transparent, participatory, and collaborative approach is revolutionizing the way software is created, improved, and used.

Although open source release has already provided numerous benefits to NASA, the full benefits of open source can only be realized if NASA is able to establish the processes, policies, and culture needed to encourage and support open source development. This will require expanding open source activities beyond releasing software only after completion and finding new ways to support two-way collaboration with an open development community throughout the entire software lifecycle.

Facilitated by Wayne Moses Burke and Lucas Cioffi of the Open Forum Foundation, this “Focus Forum” style event will move beyond abstract discussion to produce real, actionable solutions to NASA’s toughest open source challenges. Throughout the event, guest speakers will provide insights into best practices and share valuable lessons learned in building and leveraging open source communities. Confirmed speakers include Pascal Finette, Director of Mozilla Labs, Dr. Robert Sutor, Vice President of Open Systems at IBM, Chris Wanstrath, CEO and co-founder of Github, Brian Stevens, CTO and Vice President of Worldwide Engineering at Red Hat, Linda Cureton, CIO for NASA and Terry Fong, Director of NASA Ames Research Center’s Intelligent Robotics Group.

Participants will split into discussion sessions to address challenges with the existing policy framework and brainstorm potential solutions. Focus groups include licensing, government restrictions such as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, governance, and risk assessments.

Physical participation in the Open Source Summit is limited, however virtual participation is open to anyone through live streaming, electronic discussion, and collaborative note taking.